Day eleven starts off with a tour of the Mekong River Delta. At this point, seeing a house boat is no cause to pull out my camera. Until I see A DOG on the boat. And then I'm all *click* *click* *click* *click*. It's like a real life version of Pokemon Snap. Because, DOG ON A BOAT.

The first stop on the tour is to see how they traditionally make banh trang. Here's the wood they use to fire up the ovens.

I like that the heat over time has cracked the entire structure. It's kind of neat to see how this is traditionally made- takes a bit of skill to make them paper thin.

Sandbags upon the bank to the next stop.

After lunch, we went to see the bee hives and had fresh honey with tea. Here, a rooster pecks away at some lychee, not an eyeball.

Yet another dog just lounging about.

To get to the next part of the tour, they loaded us up onto rickety two-wheeled carts drawn by a scrawny little horse. I was like, what is going on?! Us large Americans loading in some six people deep I thought would make the poor horse collapse, but during the ride I noticed that the way the harness worked, it wasn't actually pressing down hard on the horse and might actually be somewhat evenly balanced.

During the ride, I leaned out my camera and had it alongside the horse for a lower view. I kinda like it.

We got off for the last stop on the tour. I felt a little bad for the horse- I would rather have had like a bus or something take the tour group instead.

View of Saigon from the rooftop of the hotel.

The area we would be wandering around on foot until the end of our journey, with Cho Ben Thanh clearly visible.

Stitched together from 8 photos, a panoramic of Saigon. My mom grew up in Saigon, but whereas my dad was able to find most of his childhood landmarks in Hue, she told me the city was unrecognizable now.

Disparate roofs.

Cho Ben Thanh, the iconic market in Saigon. It's crammed with little food stands, souvenirs, clothing, teas- you name it. I don't know how some of these places make any money because a lot of the stands all seem to be selling the same thing.

This is some government building which I didn't realize until I got closer had "No photography" signs all over. A lot of these government buildings have no photography signs outside, which I find a little odd.

In contrast to Cho Ben Thanh was the new Vincom center, a fancy mall a few blocks further full of luxury brand stores, air conditioning, and a food court with even a Beard Papa's and Popeye's.

I've been to arcades around the world, but I'd have to say Vincom center's arcade might even be better than arcades in Japan. It's a surprisingly large arcade packed with the latest high tech games and some low tech interactive games like this one. We probably spent too long in here, but oh well, air conditioning.

This has nothing to do with the photo, but this Vietnam trip coincided with the time LMFAO's Party Rockin' started getting popular, so all around Vietnam, the LilBro and I would spontaneously start singing this part of the song for no reason. And ever since Flo-Rida's "Club can't handle me", we'll also randomly blurt out "AH SEE YOU DEE GUETTA!" for absolutely no reason with no warning as we walked around.

Thought I'd just take this random picture of people taking a picture.

End day ten.

We're on the last leg of the trip, flying into Saigon in the morning. Saigon is where my mom grew up. While her family is originally from Hue, they moved to Saigon, and so her older siblings speak with a Hue (central) accent while my mom speaks with more of a Nam (southern) accent. We started the trip in the north in Hanoi, and with every new city, it's become progressively hotter. While it didn't rain as much in Saigon, the heat left me wishing it did. I generally tried to wear the lightest clothing to conceal my sweat. To rub salt in the wound, people in Saigon were walking around wearing slacks and long-sleeve clothing (I even saw a girl wearing a sweater) and NOT SWEATING. Every chance I got, I tried to duck into air conditioning to prevent more sweating.

Our hotel was much more modest here, but service was impeccable as usual.

Our first stop was to visit a family friend. During the fall of Saigon, all of my mom's siblings fled in the middle of the night on one of the last ships departing from the city. Only the eldest daughter- a doctor- stayed behind to take care of my grandparents. Ong Giac was a family friend who helped my aunt and grandparents out immensely during those years to the point where my grandfather said to consider him as one of the family. Ong Giac is a kind old man and upon our arrival ordered a banquet just for lunch. He wouldn't stop trying to feed us throughout the meal, offering well past us being full. He also made us fresh coconut water to which he added some whiskey.

The fruits out in Vietnam were amazing. I wasn't a fan of papaya, but there were a lot of fruits out here which I'm not even sure have an english name. This one was particularly neat in that each of those bumps came off in sections and you ate the part underneath. My parents kept overbuying fruit at the market and we were forced to try to finish a ton before we left.

Their dog. It was a fat little thing that seemed a bit neurotic. Why are little dogs so neurotic the world over? Also, I think people fed dogs table scraps out there instead of things like Science Diet. At least from what I saw.

I like showing the interiors because I find houses in different countries interesting.

After lunch, we headed off to pay respects to my mom's ancestors. My mom's grandmother lived to 91 and grandfather lived until 85. Her side of the family has strong longevity genes.

Saigon is kind of like the New York of Vietnam- the most modern of the three cities with the hustle and bustle of a big city.

End day nine.

We start off our last day in Hue heading off to Dan Vien Thien An- a temple that specializes in a particular item.

They're the ones who make dau xanh, or green eucalyptus oil. This thing is a panacea- headache? stomachache? mosquito bites? Joint pain? Cures all of that. My parents always have a bottle at home and this is where they make the pure, potent stuff. I always wondered when I'm older how I'd be able to get this without my Vietnam connections- the stuff they sell in the States just don't cut it.

On the trees at the temple, they have jackfruit growing out of them. I had no idea this is how they grew. Jackfruit plants have a super sticky sap- my dad said when he was little, he had nothing better to do so he'd stick some of the sap on the end of a stick and catch cicadas with it.

The next stop was to the Huyen Tran temple. My parents say it was built in honor of a princess that was sent to Cambodia to marry the king in exchange for land to increase Vietnam's borders. They said the well-known story is sad, and wikipedia seems to indicate it as such.

From there we headed off to the tomb of Emperor Khai Dinh. We learned that there was a secret "Vietnamese discount". If you were Vietnamese, you got a discount off the regular admission at many historical areas. My parents bought the family's tickets, but my brothers and I almost got stopped for not paying (we clearly looked like tourists) and my parents had to convince them we were their sons and we were with them. Granted, the "discount" is like saving a quarter so it's not that big a deal, I just found it amusing.

I was walking up the steps to the top and was pleasantly surprised to see this guy at the top of the steps looking back at me. Dogs out here are nice but mind their own business. I wouldn't have minded if he followed me around, but he went back to doing dog things after he saw me coming up the steps.

Statue of Emperor Khai Dinh. I don't think he was very popular with the people after reading his wikipedia.

We were back at the resort wandering around the nearby neighborhood looking for lunch when we got a recommendation to eat here.

They had some pretty amazing banh beo, which is a specialty of Hue, my peoples.

In fact, all these shrimp-based foods were incredibly good- the shrimp tasted super fresh and you could see it being ground nearby the tables as the nice owner prepared the food for us and brought it out as she made smalltalk with my parents. Another amazing meal in Hue.

We decided to go on the river tour on the boat behind our hotel and when we got on, there was a little baby girl sitting on the boat! So cute. My mom tried to find something to buy from the lady on the boat but couldn't find anything and just gave the mother some money to buy her kid something nice.

It was our last day in Hue and so while my parents went out around the area shopping, the LilBro and I did some trekking of our own. We crossed the bridge in search of McDonald's (couldn't find any at all in Vietnam) to see if they had any weird menu items, but we ended up at KFC instead. Nothing different except this new chicken flavor which I think translated into "lime leaves"? It was pretty good- tasted a bit like lemon pepper mixed with kfc's crispy seasonings. Not bad. The chicken sandwich was normal and I could have done without that.

That night we randomly went to some restaurant which was just kinda okay in terms of food, but the upside is that there were a buncha little cats and kittens running around. I was eating dinner and looked down and saw this little guy staring up at me.

End day eight.

We start off the morning meeting my cousin up for coffee. Vietnamese people love their cafes and my cousin says he goes here for an hour every morning with his friends to shoot the breeze before going off to work. Seems like a pretty nice lifestyle.

Throughout our stay in Hue and during the long car rides, my parents talked with my cousin about life in Hue these days. My cousin was joking that if you get pulled over by cops in Vietnam while driving and you're an American, they'll usually just let you go because they don't want to hassle with trying to speak English with you. I believe the average wage for an office worker was to the tune of $3000 US per year. Getting a wedding photographer and videographer in Vietnam costs about $250. With an income of maybe $3000 out here, that's comparable to the cost of a photographer/videographer in the US. Interesting to see how the prices roughly reflect their US counterpart.

This is the backyard. My cousin told me that the day after we left Vietnam, the country pretty much flooded and they had to close down the airports. He was knee deep in water in the back yard.

We went to the back to the old house that was still attached. Here's a family tree.

The ancestral area in the back.

This is the room my dad stayed in when he visited in 2000. He said it was a bit creepy and I agree- everything is extremely old in this room and it seems like the doors or windows wouldn't hold up against g-g-ghosts.

My cousin had written down a history of the house by hand.

My cousin's house. It, of course, has more than one floor. I don't even know if there are any one-story houses out here.

For dinner, we met up my dad's old elementary school classmates at an outdoor restaurant. It was pouring rain and I had them bring over an extra citronella candle because I was getting eaten alive by mosquitoes.

A bottle of Chivas out here runs about $25

My dad's old classmates. Some had driven an hour to meet up and would be staying overnight. These men all seem to have aged differently over the years, but it's nice to think that they've all been able to keep in touch for nearly 60 years, past a civil war and the hardships of life. I'm awful at keeping in touch with even people from college which is why I'm always impressed that the sense of community is so much stronger with my parents' generation.

End day seven.

Day six starts off with a long day on the road. We stop off at this soldier memorial by a bridge.

Some little boys are peddling their bikes and stop to stare at us, my brothers and I probably looking obviously like foreigners. They're cute and my parents ask them where they're going to school and a few other questions. One kid is shy, but his friend is outspoken and responds to each question with a smile. My parents give them some kitkats from Japan and they continue biking off while we head back out on the road.

This area may not seem like much, but the bridge- Cau Hien Luong- overlooking the water is where the North and the South exchanged prisoners during the war.

We made a detour to pick up a distant elderly relative to visit the family cemetery. He was the keeper of the knowledge of the family tree and everyone's relationship at the family cemetery- I'm not sure how that knowledge will be passed on when he passes away, but I believe he has had everything written down. The family cemetery was located along a sandy beach. It was miserable, cold, and pouring rain when we went out there- proper weather for visiting such a place, I suppose. It's interesting to see the family cemetery- in America, when a relative passed, it always seemed a little lonely, not surrounded by the graves of ancestors and in a completely foreign country. Here was where the ancestors on my dad's side were buried. When he went back to Vietnam in 2000, the money that he and my relatives had pooled went to fix up the gravestones and plots properly. We visited another plot of land that the family owned a little further away to clean up those graves as well. Upon arrival, my dad was upset to see that some random people had used the front portion of the land to bury their dead. After we paid our respects, we continued on our journey.

We stopped off at a restaurant on the way to the caverns. There was a big dog and little dog hanging out by our table the whole meal. The little one kept looking up at us.

Our boat ride which would eventually take us to Dong Phong Nha, another set of caverns. Our seats were literally chairs.

The ride there is misty on the verge of raining, cold, and overcast.

Parked.

Once more into the fray, this time unguided.

We reach the seeming end of the path and see a light on the other side and figure we have to climb up the slippery path. There's a Chinese couple behind us and figure we knew where we were going and climbed up right behind us.

We're treated to the site of an enormous cavern- much larger than the one at Ha Long Bay. Sorry for the blurry pics- it was also darker in this cavern and I didn't have a tripod. If you look in the inky blackness at the back of this photo, we were told that if it hadn't been flooding we would have been able to go even deeper into the cave.

I'll bet this is kind of like the cave of wonders in Aladdin, except without the treasures and talking tiger head. We also discovered a little further down that we didn't have to climb up that slippery path- there was another path just on the other side which was much safer.

These caves were much more impressive than Ha Long Bay's in terms of grandeur. There was an even larger one discovered just a few years ago that hasn't been opened to the public yet, but it's supposed to be the largest in the world.

My brother wore these fancy shoes the entire trip. Unfortunately, it rained 90% of the time we were there, so they were wet the entire trip. The price of haute couture.

Our driver for the Hue leg of the trip was a nice kid- 22 years old and super friendly. I think to hire a driver for the day cost something along the lines of $60 for the entire day, with the driver only making a few bucks a day. Unfortunately our jaunts lasted into the evening with the distances we traveled, and sometimes the rental company would call and ask where he was since it was so late, yet he never complained. My dad tipped him plenty though. Good service comes with its own rewards.

End day six.

Our next destination was to the Ngo Mon Gate, the main entrance to the Imperial City.

I asked my dad if the imperial grounds looked like this back in the 50's when he was younger. He said that after the Viet Cong took over, they just painted the whole thing whatever they wanted (in this case, bright red) and didn't try to research and restore it to be historically accurate. Sad.

The palace grounds. It was torn up during the war and there are still some areas in ruins today.

Pavilion on the north side of the Imperial City.

Tree along the famous Tinh Tam Lake. My dad said everyone in Hue knew it as the tree where the ghost of a lady with long hair sat and that even during the day on the way home from school he would run past it- it was that scary. And it was kind of creepy, really. You weren't in 'Nam, man, you don't know.

Next stop was to my dad's old elementary school.

It was actually pretty neat touring the school grounds. My dad briefly chatted with a teacher who was still in her classroom. I didn't take any photos, but the classrooms themselves look like they hadn't changed since my dad was there.

Next stop was to my dad's old junior high. Unfortunately, it's now a war museum.

I'm not sure at what point a school gets shut down and turned into a war museum.

At dinner that night, the BigBro found pig brain on the menu. It came served like this. It's surprisingly good! It tasted like egg yolk with a similar consistency, like when you eat the yolk of balut.

A stray dog drinking from the little pond in front of the restaurant.

End day five.

We went to check back into the hotel, and look what we had to resort to. Eh? EH?!

We ended up staying at the resort hotel at a ridiculously cheap price. My dad said we got the employee discount despite not even having any connections to the hotel- my cousin’s wife’s brother-in-law’s friend worked at the hotel and gave us the discount.

AND they upgraded my brothers’ and my room to have 2 full-sized beds and a queen bed in the connecting room. It was ridiculous.

I don't know why that bathroom has translucent glass, but luckily there's also a curtain you can draw there.

Ughhhh whhaaattt??

All the games are the same as the US counterparttttttt

Let me make a quick comment about television in Vietnam. It was actually entertaining enough where my brothers and I would just sit around in our hotel room and watch tv way too much. There’s VTV, the Vietnamese version of MTV, where they would play a ton of kpop mixed in with American top 40. There was the Vietnamese music video channel, which I would always flip through to see if there was any upbeat dancy Vietpop, but was always disappointed to find the slow Vietnamese ballads.

And finally, there were the Chinese and Korean dramas. This was the most ridiculous part- those dramas weren’t subtitled- they were dubbed in Vietnamese. By a woman. Who dubbed over in the same monotone voice for ALL the male and female characters on the show. And you could still kind of hear the original korean/chinese voices underneath. It was completely bizarre, but the same for every city we went to in Vietnam.

We headed off to Chua Thien Mu, or the Thien Mu Pagoda. I think the wikipedia story is a little different, but my parents say the history of the temple was that long ago, the first emperor of the Nguyen dynasty was traveling through Hue and one night he saw a nun (whether it was in a vision, I wasn't sure) who told him that this location would be a fortuitous place to establish the capitol. To repay his indebtedness to the nun, he built this Chua Thien Mu, which translates roughly into the Temple of the Holy Lady.

The temple also carries something surprising- a relic from an iconic photograph.

If you look on the dashboard of the car, you'll realize that this was the car in the background of the iconic burning Vietnamese monk photo.

I had to google images a lot of these photos to figure out the names. This one is the Thien Mu Pagoda bell house

I really like this pic. This would be like a good profile pic or something.

Our next destination was to the Tu Duc Royal Tomb.

It starts off with a view of Luu Khiem Lake.

From there, you can take the bridge over to Xung Khiem Pavilion pictured above.

The Stele Pavilion. I just looked it up and it's a little sad.

The NguyenBros with the Mandarins in the forecourt. Yeesh, I don't know why I'm craning out from behind the statue so much.

I like this picture of my folks. This is why you take up photography.

Hoa Khiem Palace.

The nearby Tu Hieu temple.

Moss covering most everything out here.

It's our first day in Hue and my dad wasted no time in visiting all his old schools. There were large gates to enter the school grounds and my dad would ask the gate guards if it was okay for an old man to show his family around the schools he had once attended. Fortunately, it was after school let out, so we were able to walk the school grounds.

This was his high school- one of the biggest of its day. They've since erected a statue of Ho Chi Minh in the square (the statue was inscribed with a different name- my parents explained to me that Ho Chi Minh gave himself several names), and my dad was mad that that man had nothing to do whatsoever with his high school and yet here was his statue.

It still felt really old as we walked about.

My dad attended an all-boy's school. This was the equivalent all-girl's school

We land in Hue, my dad's hometown, early in the morning.

Flooded fields from the airplane.

Hue’s airport is hilarious- upon landing, you see in large letters “Hue International Airport”. Except we were the only plane at the airport. We disembarked from the plane onto the bus and took the bus all of 10 seconds to go the short distance to the terminal. We were all laughing, and once inside, we saw there was only one luggage carousel for (I think) the entire terminal. I’ve been to airports in the middle-of-nowhere America and they’ve had more gates than this.

Hue was a breath of fresh air from the crowded, slightly dirtier Hanoi. Hue is definitely a lot more rural- the most rural out of Hanoi, Hue, and Saigon. My cousin Anh Bin- my aunt’s son who had remained in Vietnam the whole time while his two brothers and sister came over to the US- picked us up in a large rented van.

We dropped off our (ridiculous amount of) suitcases in the hotel lobby as it was too early to check in yet.

My cousin took us out for an early morning breakfast.

Bun bo hue, or as Seo amusingly calls it, "BBH". There's no air conditioning in this restaurant, there's a stray dog sitting out front, there are some flies flying around the tables, and it's maybe 10 AM, but this is the best bun bo hue I've ever had. It's spicy, the broth is rich, and there's a nice mix of flavors and textures all swimming about in this delicious bowl. I kind of want to order another bowl. And I kind of want to eat this every morning. But we have to head off to our next destination.

We're off to take care of my grandfather's grave. We pass by a rundown temple near the cemetery and my dad told me about how when he was in the boy scouts as a kid, his troop would camp out here. NEAR A CEMETERY.

My cousin leads us to my grandfather's grave. Frankly, it's ridiculous out here- there are no clear paths, everything is unkempt with vegetation sprouting out everywhere, and it's a winding maze with no markers really to make your way out here. If it weren't for my cousin, I don't know how anyone would know to find it. Around Tet (or Lunar New Year), the place gets packed with people coming to clean up ancestors' graves like we were doing.

The plot is overgrown with weeds and we hack away at the vegetation surrounding the grave with a dull blade and pull weeds from the area to properly pay our respects.

My grandfather. He passed away at 35 years old when my dad was four years old, so he doesn't remember much of him, but my uncle and aunt certainly do.

We cleared out as much as we could, paid our respects, and headed on back.

LilBro jumping over puddles of water on the way back.